As I’ve noted here before, the current crisis of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has had one upside. It has forced the actual GOP stance on immigration out into the open, increasingly boxing Republicans into a position where their main solution to the broader immigration crisis is effectively advocating for maximum deportations from the interior, including of the DREAMers.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz plans to take a hard-line stand that could rile up conservatives just as lawmakers — including two from his home state — are struggling to address the growing humanitarian crisis along the southern border.

The conservative firebrand believes that any bill to deal with the unaccompanied migrant children at the border must also include language to stop a 2012 immigration directive from President Barack Obama — a proposal unlikely to go anywhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

It’s true that Cruz is differing from his two fellow Texans — Senator John Cornyn and Rep. Henry Cuellar — on how to respond to the short term crisis. Cruz is pushing for any GOP legislative response to it to include language ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — i.e., the program deferring deportation of the DREAMers — while the two other Texans aren’t.

But the policy goal that Cruz is advocating is widely shared by many in the GOP, even if they aren’t advocating for it to be included in the party’s immediate response to the crisis. Republicans have long attacked Obama for failing to “enforce the law” on immigration, by which they mean Obama’s deferral of deportation of the DREAMers has shown him to be lawless. Criticism of this is effectively a call for Obama to deport them all. But when Republicans have previously been pressed on whether that’s what they are advocating for, they have tended to sidestep the question.

Yet now that the widespread GOP response to the current crisis is that Obama’s failure to deport the DREAMers is to blame, because it has created a “magnet” for more kids to come, it has grown impossible for Republicans to obscure the true implications of their argument.

In the short term, this Cruz gambit could make it tougher for John Boehner to get any border bill through the House, and increasingly reliant on Dems to do so. But beyond this, it’s a reminder that even if the crisis is very tough politics for Obama and Dems, it is also putting Republicans in a terrible position, dramatizing that they have only moved further to the right on immigration since their 2012 loss led to a big round of soul searching about how to broaden the party’s appeal beyond core constituencies. As Steve Benen notes, they are now farther outside the mainstream on this issue than ever.

Republicans like to say they can do reform in 2015 and begin to get right with Latinos in time for the 2016 presidential election. But if anything, reform could get harder next year, particularly if the GOP presidential primary gets going and Cruz demagogues the immigration issue to win far right GOP primary voters. Indeed, we’re now getting a preview of what that might look like.

Republican sources…say Speaker John Boehner will have difficulty passing a smaller supplemental — in the ballpark of $1.5 billion — paired with policy changes. They estimate Boehner needs 50 to 60 Democratic votes to pass it because conservative members are leery about emergency spending, which adds to the deficit, and want a harder line taken against the illegal immigrants.

As noted here the other day, the likelihood of conservatives balking at any spending on the border crisis is looming as a big test for Boehner. The problem is that any such policy changes to speed removals designed to win over Republicans risk losing Democrats.

During the meeting Obama told the group that he wanted “to find a way to ensure due process but also speed things up” in the processing of young migrants, according to another lawmaker in the room who asked not to be identified in order to frankly describe the president’s opinions.

It’s still unclear where this goes from here. The question is whether Senate Democrats move their own bill forward that only provides funding to address the crisis, with no legal changes to speed deportations.

Or is it more likely that in blocking reform, GOP leaders are catering only to a very far right slice of Republicans who are the only ones genuinely adamant in their opposition, as even some GOP pollsters have argued?

“I get many letters every day from constituents who say, ‘O.K., you have the power of the purse; now cut off the funding,’ ” Ms. Foxx said, describing a plea that many conservatives have made for Congress to defund the health care law. “What they forget to note is that when the laws pass the House, they also have to pass the Senate. So it is not a unilateral authority that we have in the House.”

So the GOP lawsuit — which is ostensibly about Obama’s supposed flouting of the separation of powers — is partly about assuaging GOP frustration over the Republican-controlled House’s inability to impose its will on the whole system, thanks to divided government.

If Republicans are to win the Senate, they probably are going to have to do something they haven’t done since 1980: beat more than two Democratic Senate incumbents in November…Republicans have had some good Senate elections, like in 1994 — when they netted eight seats and took control of the upper chamber — as well as 2004 and 2010, when they netted four and six seats, respectively. But these were electoral triumphs built mainly on winning Democratic seats where incumbents were not running…Republicans have some obscure but relevant history to overcome.

Read the whole thing. If you give Republicans three seats at the outset — West Virginia, South Dakota and Montana — they still will likely have to oust three remaining Dem incumbents. And these Dems are proving pretty resourceful in emphasizing their brands and roots in the states.

* COLORADO SENATE RACE VERY CLOSE: A new Quinnipiac poll finds GOPer Cory Gardner with a slight edge over Senator Mark Udall in Colorado, 44-42, which Quinnipiac describes as “tied.” This is at odds with yesterday’s NBC poll finding Udall up seven points.

As always, go back to the polling average: It shows Udall up by one, 45-44. As always, what happens here (and in Iowa and Michigan) will provide clues to whether the GOP is meaningfully broadening the map beyond the core red state battlegrounds.

In the past, conservatives have used social and cultural issues as wedges to split Democratic constituencies. Now, Democrats view the GOP’s attitude toward government as a wedge issue that might make pro-business populism possible. In American politics, stranger things have happened.

As noted here yesterday, the battle over infrastructure investment (which the business community wants) is a good example of an area where GOP leaders are willing to stiff-arm the anti-government Tea Party. There are very few other such areas, though, a fact Dems will try to exploit.

What else?

Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog, a reported opinion blog with a liberal slant -- what you might call “opinionated reporting” from the left.

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